"The [Vagrant Trilogy] extends far beyond the timeline of devastating events, and instead shows us something greater: humanity." - Broadway World The Vagrant Trilogy is a set of three plays by award-winning Arab American playwright Mona Mansour which explores the Palestinian condition prior to, during, and after the infamous Six-Day War. It sketches the devastating effect this conflict had on members of the Palestinian diaspora scattered in Europe and in Lebanese refugee camps. With productions in Washington DC, New York, and Abu Dhabi, this trilogy has moved audiences across both America and the Arabic-speaking world. The Hour of Feeling, The Vagrant, and Urge for Going offer a deep exploration of the Palestinian struggle for home and identity, a powerful glimpse into a reality that many face and few understand. The volume includes a foreword by director Mark Wing-Davey; an introduction by Arab American theatre scholars Hala Baki and Michael Malek Najjar; the three plays in their final performance versions; an interview with playwright Mona Mansour; and a critical essay by literary scholar Diya Abdo. This collection of Mansour's outstanding plays is another important contribution to the Arab American theatrical canon and the larger body of American drama.

"In this exciting new anthology, Wesley Brown and Aimee K. Michel bring together six wonderfully teachable plays by some of the greatest American women dramatists of the past fifty years-- Ntozake Shange, Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel, Lynn Nottage, Beth Henley, and Susan Yankowitz. The editors provide a helpful Introduction to the last 100 years of theatrical activity, from suffrage and anti-lynching plays, through the explosive 1960s, to recent Broadway triumphs, highlighting women's struggle-a struggle that continues--to put their vision and voices on the American stage." Elin Diamond, Rutgers University, USA This volume celebrates the iconoclastic power of six American women playwrights who pushed the boundaries of the form outside the box of conventional drama. Each play is accompanied by a short introduction providing the biographical background of the playwright as well as discussing the dramatic style of her writing, the extent to which her work is informed by major playwrights of the period, and how the specific work illustrates the overarching themes of her body of work. The plays included are: Gun by Susan Yankowitz Spell #7: geechee jibara quik magic trance manual for technologically stressed third world people by Ntozake Shange The Jacksonian by Beth Henley The Baltimore Waltz by Paula Vogel In the Blood by Suzan-Lori Parks Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage

This book is a landmark study of Shakespeare's politics as revealed in his later History Plays. It offers the first ever survey of anti-monarchism in Western literature, history and philosophy, tracked from Hesiod and Homer through to contemporaries of Shakespeare such as George Buchanan and the authors of the Mirror for Magistrates, thus demonstrating that anxiety over monarchic power, and contemptuous demolitions of kingship as a disastrously irrational institution, formed an important and irremovable body of reflection in prestigious Western writing. Overturning the widespread assumption that "Elizabethans believed in divine right monarchy", it exposits the anti-monarchic critique built into Shakespeare's Histories and Marlowe's Massacre at Paris, in five chapters of close literary critical readings, paying innovative attention to performance values. Part Two focuses Queen Elizabeth's principal challenger for national rule: the Earl of Essex, England's most popular man. It demonstrates from detailed readings that, far from being an admirer of the war-crazed, unstable, bi-polar Essex, as is regularly asserted, Shakespeare launched in Richard II and Henry IV a campaign to puncture the reputation of the great earl, exposing him as a Machiavel seeking Elizabeth's throne. Shakespeare emerges as a humane and clear-sighted critic of the follies intrinsic to dynastic monarchy: yet hostile, likewise, to the rash militarist, Essex, who would fling England into permanent war against Spain. Founded on an unprecedented and wide-ranging study of anti-monarchist thought, this book presents a significant contribution to Shakespeare and Marlowe criticism, studies of Tudor England, and the history of ideas.

Staging Favorites explores theatrical representations of royal favorites in Spanish, French, and English dramatic production during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this time, the courts of Spain, France, and England were dominated by all-powerful ministers who enjoyed royal favor. The politics of royal favoritism gave rise to a significant group of plays which constitutes the subject of this book. While scholars have studied this group partially and separately in national context, Staging Favorites approaches these "dramas about favorites" from a wider European point of view, and performs comparative analyses of a number of plays - including La paciencia en la fortuna; Le Favori, ou la Coquette; and Sejanus His Fall - and adds new detail and differentiation to the early modern perception and representation of the royal favorite. This book will appeal to scholars and students interested in early modern literature, history of theater, and cultural history.

These essays of Sarah Carpenter have been selected to reflect her career's close focus on the relationship of performance and audience. They are drawn from the last 25 years of her writing, and this has enabled the editors to organise them not chronologically but rather to develop her central theme through a range of genres, including morality plays, the interlude, court entertainments, international political spectacle, and the public 'performances' of natural and maintained fools. As a scholar who also has experience of acting and of production, Carpenter is particularly sensitive to the implications of location for creating meaning and generating audience reaction. The essays are focused on a relatively short time-span of 120 years, from the late fifteenth to the turn of the seventeenth century, and thus nuance a period traditionally divided between the late medieval and the early-modern, and between Catholicism and Protestantism. Carpenter shows how the dynamics of theatrical engagement in which the roles of audience and performer are frequently mixed or even reversed offer a more creative route to understanding how the individual and society respond to change. (CS1090)

The first volume to collect these 3 political plays in one volume. Intro and commentary discusses these texts in the context of Greek history and politics, but also political science and theory as regards more recent eras, including our own, allowing students to relate to the material and work comparitively. The 3 plays selected are the world's first detailed portrayal of demagogy, making them very topical to contemporary readers.

The first volume to collect these 3 political plays in one volume. Intro and commentary discusses these texts in the context of Greek history and politics, but also political science and theory as regards more recent eras, including our own, allowing students to relate to the material and work comparitively. The 3 plays selected are the world's first detailed portrayal of demagogy, making them very topical to contemporary readers.

Callan Davies presents "strangeness" as a fresh critical paradigm for understanding the construction and performance of Jacobean drama-one that would have been deeply familiar to its playwrights and early audiences. This study brings together cultural analysis, philosophical enquiry, and the history of staged special effects to examine how preoccupation with the strange unites the verbal, visual, and philosophical elements of performance in works by Marston, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, and Beaumont and Fletcher. Strangeness in Jacobean Drama therefore offers an alternative model for understanding this important period of English dramatic history that moves beyond categories such as "Shakespeare's late plays," "tragicomedy," or the home of cynical and bloodthirsty tragedies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of early modern drama and philosophy, rhetorical studies, and the history of science and technology.

This book is the first comprehensive examination of commercial drama as a reading genre in early modern England. Taking as its focus pre-Restoration printed drama's most common format, the single-play quarto playbook, it interrogates what the form and content of these playbooks can tell us about who their earliest readers were, why they might have wanted to read contemporary commercial drama, and how they responded to the printed versions of plays that had initially been performed in the playhouses of early modern London. Focusing on professional plays printed in quarto between 1584 and 1660, the book juxtaposes the implications of material and paratextual evidence with analysis of historical traces of playreading in extant playbooks and manuscript commonplace books. In doing so, it presents more detailed and nuanced conclusions than have previously been enabled by studies focused on works by one author or on a single type of evidence.

Originally published in 1949 this book is a study of comedy based on representative works of drama and narrative, mainly in English, from Chaucer to Bernard Shaw. The theme is that comedy implies a philosophy of life that is fairly constant, despite the changes in social conditions and fashions of thought. There is a bibliographical index and the book is illustrated fully and widely by quotations from English comic writers.

Originally published in 1931, this book surveys the origin and development of Greek Comic Drama, with full discussion not only of Aristophanes and Menander but also of other important playwrights whose work had usually received scant notice because only fragments of it have survived. The important papyrus-finds of the previous forty years have been expounded and used. The final chapter is an introduction to comic metre and rhythm.

The essays in this collection cover the entire range of Irish drama, from the late nineteenth-century melodramas (anticipating the rise of the Abbey Theatre) to the contemporary Dublin of theater festivals. In addition to studies of individual playwrights, the collection includes an examination of the relationship between the theater and its political context as reflected through its ideology, staging and programming. Including a complete chronology and bibliography, this collection will be an important introduction to one of the world's most vibrant theater cultures.

Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides are often described as the greatest tragedians of the ancient world. Of these three pivotal founders of modern drama, Euripides is characterized as the interloper and the innovator: the man who put tragic verse into the mouths of slaves, women and the socially inferior in order to address vital social issues such as sex, class and gender relations. It is perhaps little wonder that his work should find such resonance in the modern day. In this concise introduction, Isabelle Torrance engages with the thematic, cultural and scholarly difficulties that surround his plays to demonstrate why Euripides remains a figure of perennial relevance. Addressing here issues of social context, performance theory, fifth-century philosophy and religion, textual criticism and reception, the author presents an astute and attractively-written guide to the Euripidean corpus - from the widely read and celebrated Medea to the lesser-known and deeply ambiguous Alcestis.

This classic text is the tale of a woman who becomes involved in murder without realizing the terrible price she will pay for it. This edition includes an introduction which analyzes the play in detail, and a commentary illuminating difficulties in the play for the modern reader.

In tracing the course of French comedy from the Renaissance, through the age of Louis XIV and the eighteenth century, to the eve of the Revolution, originally published in 1977, Geoffrey Brereton shows how it evolved from the crude farces and experimental plays of the sixteenth century to become a rich and highly sophisticated dramatic genre. The main emphasis is on the work of the principal dramatists, notably Moliere (whose plays and career are given a detailed and enlightening treatment), Corneille, Scarron, Marivaux and Beaumarchais, with some space devoted to the more neglected writers, such as the 'cynical generation' of Dancourt, Regnard, Lesage and others; and all the plays are seen in the context of the theatrical conventions that helped to shape them. Different types of comedy are analysed, including comedy of character and of manners, as well as the romantic, burlesque and bourgeois forms and the development of the opera-comique. At the same time Dr Brereton examines the influences on French comedy - influences as varied as those of the farce, the Italian commedia dell'arte, the Spanish comedia and the eighteenth century drame - and the way in which these were absorbed and exploited by French comic dramatists. Since comedy, more than any other kind of drama, reflects the contemporary social scene, attention is drawn to social conditions and attitudes, and some of the more striking parallels with modern social preoccupations are pointed out. Written in a very lively and readable style, and containing much stimulating and original comment, as well as providing the basic facts, it gives a considerable insight into the nature of French comedy during its most formative and fruitful period. A substantial bibliography and other reference material increase the usefulness of this book to the student of French drama.

This book examines the influence of the early modern period on Antonin Artaud's seminal work The Theatre and Its Double, arguing that Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and their early modern context are an integral part of the Theatre of Cruelty and essential to its very understanding. The chapters draw links between the early modern theatrical obsession with plague and regeneration, and how it is mirrored in Artaud's concept of cruelty in the theatre. As a discussion of the influence of Shakespeare and his contemporaries on Artaud, and the reciprocal influence of Artaud on contemporary interpretations of early modern drama, this book is an original addition to both the fields of early modern theatre studies and modern drama.

This collection of newly commissioned essays explores the extraordinary versatility of Renaissance tragedy and shows how it enables exploration of issues ranging from gender to race to religious conflict, as well as providing us with some of the earliest dramatic representations of the lives of ordinary Englishmen and women. The book mixes perspectives from emerging scholars with those of established ones and offers the first systematic examination of the full range and versatility of Renaissance tragedy as a literary genre. It works by case study, so that each chapter offers not only a definition of a particular kind of Renaissance tragedy but also new research into a particularly noteworthy or influential example of that genre. Collectively the essays examine the work of a range of dramatists and offer a critical overview of Renaissance tragedy as a genre. -- .

Racine the practising dramatist had been in some danger of being crowded out from the numerous books on his psychology and style. In this critical study of the man and his work, first published in 1951 and this slightly revised edition originally in 1973, Dr Brereton's guiding principle has been to make the factual basis as accurate as it can be in the light of modern research. The result is the portrait of a sensitive and attractive figure which is none the worse for being shorn of certain legends.

What did publicity look like before the eighteenth century? What were its uses and effects, and around whom was it organized? The essays in this collection ask these questions of early modern London. Together, they argue that commercial theater was a vital engine in celebrity's production. The men and women associated with playing-not just actors and authors, but playgoers, characters, and the extraordinary local figures adjunct to playhouse productions-introduced new ways of thinking about the function and meaning of fame in the period; about the networks of communication through which it spread; and about theatrical publics. Drawing on the insights of Habermasean public sphere theory and on the interdisciplinary field of celebrity studies, Publicity and the Early Modern Stage introduces a new and comprehensive look at early modern theories and experiences of publicity.

Henry V, the climax of Shakespeare's sequence of English history plays, is an inspiring, often comic celebration of a young warrior-king. But it is also a study of the costly exhilarations of war, and of the penalties as well as the glories of human greatness. Introducing this brilliantly innovative edition, Gary Taylor shows how Shakespeare shaped his historical material, examines controversial critical interpretations, discusses the play's fluctuating fortunes in performance, and analyses the range and variety of Shakespeare's characterization. The first Folio text is radically rethought, making original use of the First Quarto (1600).

Teaching creative writing for the multicultural, global, and digital generation, this volume offers a fresh approach for enhancing core writing skills in the major forms of Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Drama. A Guide to Creative Writing and the Imagination aims to provide students with organic, active learning through imitation and examples which not only emphasize writing and reading but look to other art forms for inspiration. This volume's key features include: * Strengthening key underlying capabilities of what we mean by imagination: physical and mental alertness, clarity of perception, listening skills, attention to detail, sustained concentration, lateral thinking, and enhanced memory. * Taking direction from other art forms such as African American musical improvisation, Brancusi's sculptural idea of "finding form," key ideas from drawing such as foreground, background, and negative space-and some of the great lessons learned from National Geographic photography. * Incorporating techniques drawn from unusual sources such as advertising, military intelligence, ESL, working with the blind, stage magic, and oral traditions of remote indigenous cultures in Oceania and Africa. The work is intended for a global English market as a core or supplementary text at the undergraduate level and as a supporting frame at the M.F.A. level.

Shakespeare and Emotional Expression offers an exciting new way of considering emotional transactions in Shakespearean drama. The book is significant in its scope and originality as it uses the innovative medium of colour terms and references to interrogate the early modern emotional register. By examining contextual and cultural influences, this work explores the impact these influences have on the relationship between colour and emotion and argues for the importance of considering chromatic references as a means to uncover emotional significances. Using a broad range of documents, it offers a wider understanding of affective expression in the early modern period through a detailed examination of several dramatic works. Although colour meanings fluctuate, by paying particular attention to contextual clues and the historically specific cultural situations of Shakespeare's plays, this book uncovers emotional significances that are not always apparent to modern audiences and readers. Through its examination of the nexus between the history of emotions and the social and cultural uses of colour in early modern drama, Shakespeare and Emotional Expression adds to our understanding of the expressive and affective possibilities in Shakespearean drama.

This book contains the first comprehensive account of writing by women from the mid sixteenth century through to 1700. At the same time, it traces the way a representative sample of that writing was published, circulated in manuscript, read, anthologized, reprinted, and discussed from the time it was produced through to the present day. Salzman's study covers an enormous range of women from all areas of early modern society, and it covers examples of the many and varied genres produced by these women, from plays to prophecies, diaries to poems, autobiographies to philosophy. As well as introducing readers to the wealth of material produced by women in the early modern period, this book examines changing responses to what was written, tracing a history of reception and transmission that amounts to a cultural history of changing taste.

A scholarly edition of plays by Ben Jonson. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Intended for dramatisation by young scholars, these three interludes blend boisterous English comedy with humanist interest in the classical world.